u/bfollowell

My wife and I are breaking ground on a new home next month and we've decided that, as we aren't getting any younger, we like the idea of the security of a whole-house generator. Even though I see Generacs everywhere, from what little research I've done so far, I'm leaning more towards Kohler. Our home will be approximately 3,700 square feet and will be heated via NG with a NG water heater. Any generator we install would also run on NG. We're concerned more with snow load and ice storms and losing power in the winter. Losing power during the summer to a thunderstorm or something similar is also an inconvenience, but not nearly as drastic as losing power in the middle of winter. Even though it is technically a "whole-house" generator, we don't intend to run every single thing in the house or have every single light on in the middle of an emergency. We would plan on manually turning off lights and devices we don't need. We're focusing on staying relatively comfortable with a normal amount of light where it is needed and a normal amount of entertainment, computer, TVs, Internet, etc. Nothing too crazy. We don't plan to be doing laundry during a power outage. I'm trying to get an idea what size we should be considering for our home. The most common Kohler residential units seem to be 26, 20, and 14kW. I was leaning towards a 26kW unit, but didn't want to assume that we would need one quite that large. We're not adding this to an existing home, so it's not really possible to do any sort of load study like you might do on an existing property.

Opinions on the size we should consider?

Thanks.

We stopped using our Tivo Roamio Plus after about ten years of good service when we cut the cord three years ago and have never looked back. We have a Tivo Roamio Plus with a lifetime membership and two Tivo Minis that we'll never use again. I hate to just throw away something that someone else may find of value, but I've heard that Tivo is on the way out, and I know most cable companies don't use cablecards anymore, so I'm not sure it would even be worth the time and shipping to get it to anyone else. Should I just pull the hard drive from the Roamio and then ewaste everything?

My wife and I are breaking ground on our new home next month and I was thinking of adding an HD antenna and setting up Tablo for local news and anything that I can't wait until the next day to stream. Are these things still working well? We gave up cable three years ago and haven't really missed it, but this seemed like it might be a neat alternative that doesn't really cost anything other than the initial equipment cost. I just want to make sure things are still working well though, before I factor in the expanse.

We're a 100% Roku family, so we'd be using the Roku Tablo app. I'm assuming that is still a thing.

My wife and I are about to break ground on a new home and we're renting a furnished short-term rental place during construction. Think along the lines of an air B&B that you live in for 8-9 months. We don't have room for my gaming rig and desk, sigh, and the old i5 desktop I built for my wife in 2016 appears to be acting up. It seems like a good time to get her a new computer and, a while ago, I decided that, when the time came, for the money and her extremely basic usage case, she'd be better off with a mini-PC. So now I'm looking into Beelink and Geekom mini PCs in the sub $600 range with a Ryzen 7 6800H or comparable PC/integrated GPU combo. With the current insane SSD and memory prices, these seem like an even better deal. What should I consider when purchasing one of these? Are there other brands in that price range I should be considering? She rarely does more than the most basic of computing/web surfing on her PC. In the past she would occasionally play some extremely basic casual games on her PC, but anymore, it's almost always on her ipad and 90% of the time it's Words with Friends.

Also, I've noticed that most of these mini-PCs don't appear to have a dedicated sound output. They have HDMI on the rear, which I'm assuming doubles as sound output, which is great if you plan to use your monitor's speakers, but let's be honest, almost all monitors and TVs have crap sound. She has dedicated, powered desktop speakers. Most of the mini-PCs seem to have an earphone jack on the front panel, so I'm assuming she'd use that to connect to her speakers? Is there a better way to do that?

Thanks.

Maybe not the best reddit for this question, but I will be using Launchbox to drive my arcade machine, so I'll start here. I was never big into racing games, but I know I'll have to have a few arcade classic racing titles on my machine, if nothing else. I don't see having a dedicated wheel and pedals on my machine, but I would like to make it in such a way that I could easily attach my old Microsoft Sidewinder wheel and pedals for the occasional game of Pole Position. How practical is setting up a Sidewinder Wheel with modern systems and getting it working with emulators?

We are heart broken. We’ve been trying to go on an NCL cruise for several years and things just keep happening. I’m starting to think it’s cursed and just isn’t meant to happen.

We had a Caribbean cruise booked in 2023, but we had a grandchild move in with us and couldn’t work it out, so we rescheduled to the next summer. The next summer came and he was still with us, so we wound up cancelling altogether. The grandson is back with his parents, so last fall, my wife booked a Mediterranean cruise. We were supposed to leave yesterday. We have been so excited. I woke up with a headache on 4/19 and, after 10 days, I finally saw my doctor. He put me on blood pressure meds and ordered an MRI. The MRI revealed a non-trauma-caused subdural hematoma! Luckily, it was small, and shouldn’t require surgery, but flying was out of the question, so we had to cancel our cruise. We are utterly heart broken to not be on our cruise at the moment, and really concerned about what money we may get returned, or credit towards a future cruise, if any.